AUTHOR=Jongkees Bryant J. , Immink Maarten A. , Finisguerra Alessandra , Colzato Lorenza S. TITLE=Transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation (tVNS) Enhances Response Selection During Sequential Action JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=9 YEAR=2018 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01159 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01159 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=
Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) is a non-invasive and safe technique that transiently enhances brain GABA and noradrenaline levels. Although tVNS has been used mainly to treat clinical disorders such as epilepsy, recent studies indicate it is also an effective tool to investigate and potentially enhance the neuromodulation of action control. Given the key roles of GABA and noradrenaline in neural plasticity and cortical excitability, we investigated whether tVNS, through a presumed increase in level of these neurotransmitters, modulates sequential behavior in terms of response selection and sequence learning components. To this end we assessed the effect of single-session tVNS in healthy young adults (